Despite its boldness, Perfect Symmetry is as swollen with corny grandeur as a political convention, guided by the delusion that a pompous speech somehow becomes fun if it’s accompanied by a balloon drop.

Despite the metaphysical yet conversational “Knowing” and a sexed-up title track that begins with his come in her hair, she doesn’t offer enough evidence that her new love is any realer than all the others she’s exulted and struggled through in eight albums going back to 1979.

Too often, though, Pebble is like a falsely vintage digital photo with specks, grain and worn edges Photoshopped in--it’s convincing on the surface but crumbles under close inspection.

If David Lynch were to direct a remake of the Victorian romance Wuthering Heights, he wouldn’t need to commission a soundtrack; Secret Machines have recorded it.

On this eight-song EP--available for free on his Web site--the amiable 42-year-old lends his peach-cobbler drawl to songs about maimed soldiers and power-drunk bullies, a doleful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 'Fortunate Son' and 'Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith),' which deploys a Bo Diddley beat to excoriate a leader who “drove us off a cliff and told us we were flyin’.”

Production by Bjork’s longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurosson paradoxically plays up the transparency of Brun’s music, floating ghostly string arrangements and vocal harmonies nearby without ever making her sound less alone, or less mournfully serene.

Despite all the players, these lush songs are transitory, not bombastic or cluttered. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

This music is better hazy, its messages garbled and out of reach. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

They're intensely twee indie rockers, prone to brisk, even jittery, grooves, and with his pinched voice, Reyes sounds as though he's grasping at something just out of his reach. [Nov 2008, p.75]

Where the last Streets record was mainly about coming up with new words to describe cocaine, the fourth is surprisingly expansive and often quite deep.

Overall, Dig Out Your Soul is a dark, heavy, chart-snubbing record that acts Oasis’s age (main songwriter Noel Gallagher is 42) and is their first in eons that doesn’t seem desperate to please. Oasis have their devil back.

OH (Ohio) ends with a straight-faced rendition of the hokey country standard 'I Believe in You,' with lyrical mush about dogs and babies, but Wagner sings it like he wants to believe every word.

The craziest moment on this debut LP is 'Fucked Up,' where they beg to have their pussies eaten one second, their teeth smashed the next.

The Pretenders’ ninth studio album is a pleasant roots record.

Retro-atmospherics guru M. Ward and grizzled guitar genius Marc Ribot leave their dusty fingerprints. Holland leaves behind a trail of her own.

The eighth volume of the erractic and fancinating Bootleg Series, exhumes his unreleased music. [Nov 2008, p.80]

Her music is exhilarating, enigma-packed and, despite the unceasing noise barrage, winningly sweet.

Here, they combine hardcore punk’s combat-boot side with its tortured-noise side, layering what sounds like scores of tsunami-distortion guitars over an atomic-speed drum blitz to attain rarely witnessed levels of obliteration (think Black Flag reincarnated as psychotic yetis).

The album splits the difference between smart and smarty-pants: The articulate arrangements occasionally overdo the left-field instrumentation, and Richard Edwards’s empathetic short-story tales flirt with fussiness.

The sonic and theatrical muscle it takes to project to 50,000 people who've paid to see another band adds a sense iof purpose that can't transfigure the superb material but does give the music its own charater. [Nov 2008, p.81]

El Guincho has only himself to get along with, but you'd never know it just listening to his album. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

At its best, the echo-chamber soup of flute trills, infinitely cascading drums and fuzz-ball stoner riffs does seep into your head and expand the contents. But the jams often drift when Ejstes wants them to glide; his singing, all in Swedish, is a touch whiny; and his ear for melody can be painfully flat.

Every white soul traditionalist from Hall & Oates to Duffy demands catchy, impactful songs, yet that’s where Thicke is thinnest.

T.I. boats one of gangsta rap's most mellifluous voices and more polysyllabic lexicons, and when he combines the two, he's dazzling, hypnotic, virtuosic. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

The protest ballads plod, and even the song about praying for God to drown the president sounds more weary than pissed. The Nightwatchman is that rare crusader whose secret identity is more exciting than his alter ego.

The recording quality on their debut album is admirably scuzzy; the drums sound like somebody’s banging a cereal box on the floor, which is part of the immediate charm.

Throughout, atmospheric ennui tugs against upbeat synth-pop--this band is best wehn it's got a beat. [Nov 2008, p.73]

A DJ is only as good as his taste, and Girl Talk is immaculate. [Sept 2008, p.78]